Anna Sayburn Lane first heard about Refugee Tales on Twitter. She is herself a writer and storyteller as well as a keen walker, so felt an immediate connection, like this was something she could do to make a difference, to counter some of the public debate around immigration which appalled her. Like most of us, she was unaware of the specific practice of indefinite detention before she got involved. She describes her involvement as an ‘eye-opener’.

​What strikes you is that people are held in limbo—they have so many restrictions on them. So many of them are desperate to work or train but they have no rights, no status, no citizenship. If you have none of those things, are apart from everything you’ve known—what are you? You have nothing.

Photograph: ​Cat Arwel

The UK is the only country in Europe to hold migrants in indefinite detention pending deportation or decisions about their leave to remain. Around 27,000 people are held in detention centres in the UK at any one time. Many of them can be there for months or even years, under conditions that are, more or less, imprisonment.

Refugee Tales is an outreach project of Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. They believe indefinite detention to be a ‘cruel and debilitating’ practice and are calling for a 28-day limit on the time that people are held. Their campaigning methods—walking and storytelling—are at once ordinary, ancient and powerful.

The walks organised by Refugee Tales and the tales that arise from them are intended to ‘reclaim the landscape of South East England for the language of welcome.’ Anna signed up to join two days of the summer walk of 2017, having no real idea what to expect.

I had signed up for the walk and thought little of it until two days before. I turned up on the Friday night and was suddenly part of this huge group. I was immediately drawn in.

A walk will comprise over a hundred people; they are supporters, people involved with the Gatwick Detainee Welfare Project, some of the people are former asylum seekers with leave to remain who might have been through the system and in detention centres themselves. Anna talks about the fellowship and the encounters in the group.

I met people from Eritrea, Sudan. They are not the kind of people I would normally come across in my day-to-day life.

After a day’s walking, you arrive at the place that’s hosting the walk and there is food, there are events. It’s been said that we are like a mobile arts festival. There will be two stories told, they might be read by writers and actors, or even those whose stories they are. There is music and dancing. Then you go to your ‘dorm’, roll out your sleeping bag and start afresh the next day.

The sense of community comes about very quickly. There is an amazing feeling of people looking out for each other. Everyone gets footsore, you get tired, everyone needs a little looking out for at some point or other and that’s what they get. It feels like a lesson—like life could always be like this.

Just like the pilgrims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a diverse group of people share a journey and talk along the way. The walking facilitates the talking.

There’s a lot of talking on the walks, but there’s nothing forced about it. It’s just a human encounter where you talk about whatever arises. People find it easier to talk while they are doing something else—i.e. walking, it’s like the intensity is broken. No one is obliged to talk about anything in particular, we can talk just as well about the weather as anyone’s life story.

The Refugee Tales as told in the books and recordings that come out of the project are written and told by some of our finest contemporary writers, based on the real life tales of detainees. Hearing some of them is hard, of course, People have survived terrible, desperate things—but there are always other things to counter that.

​There is a symbolic power in the whole experience, as well as a personal one.

​​The walk is a kind of radical act. It is. It feels like we’re saying ‘Here we are, these are our hills and beaches, here is our hospitality, you are welcome.’ It’s a very different way of receiving people than our current hostile immigration system. It does feel radical in a way, to say welcome.

Photograph: ​Chris Orange

I ask Anna what she has gained from the experience of taking part now for two consecutive years (in 2018 she was one of the leaders of the walk from St Albans to London).

The experience has opened my eyes to the ways people live in this world. The absolute vulnerability of these people makes it a humanitarian issue. I had thought people who’d made it here were in a place of safety, but often a whole lot of new risks await them if they are held indefinitely in a quasi-prison without the support they need, including PTSD or other mental health issues.

The argument for a 28-day time limit on immigration detention seems to be gaining traction. It now has the full support of the Labour Party. Some opposition MPs have joined the walk or supported events along the way. Sadly though, there will need to be another walk in 2019 as the practice of indefinite detention continues. Anna is fully involved with the planning and practice walks along the south coast for next year’s walk. She’s pretty happy to remain involved and to keep on walking for as long as it takes.​Some of the people I’ve walked with have stories with happy endings and the things they’ve overcome, they are an inspiration. They’ll be the ones carrying kids on their shoulders when the walk gets tough, the ones carrying other people’s bags, the ones playing a game of football after walking twelve miles. They are amazing. I’ve got so much from this experience, it doesn’t feel like any act of sacrifice or charity on my part.​You can find out more about how to support Refugee Tales at refugeetales.org

Mick Sands, Arts Therapist talks about his work at St Christopher’s Hospice

Mick Sands had been a successful theatre composer, working with Peter Hall and the RSC, but he always had a parallel life, using his musical and artistic talents to work with people with learning disabilities. When, twelve years ago, his professional life took a new turn, and he became part of the Arts Therapy team at St Christopher’s Hospice, he knew that the nature and the rewards of the work he would do there would be very different to those offered by the theatre. I talked to him about his work at the hospice, about dealing with the fundamentals of life and death on a day-to-day basis.

St Christophers hospice in South London was founded in 1967 by Dame Cicely Saunders, whose guiding philosophy was that ‘you matter until the last moment of your life.’ The hospice movement exists to provide the highest possible palliative care for terminally ill people, and to not only treat them medically, but provide emotional and spiritual support alongside clinical care. They provide this support to over 6,500 people in South East London each year.

‘What I have marvelled about with patients is their curiosity and their courage.’

Mick is one of the Arts Therapy team at the hospice who work with groups and individuals in a range of art forms including creative writing, painting, pottery, music, songwriting and film-making. Music is perhaps Mick’s first love.

Patients who come to him will have reached the end of curative medical treatment. While clinicians will help them manage their physical pain, it is the other pain, what has been termed ‘soul pain’, that the Arts Team are there to help with. I ask what patients are bringing to the session, what kind of things they want to explore. Mick sums it up as being about the search for meaning. People are often asking why, how come this has happened, what does my life mean now and what have I done?

A referral from the clinical team will often be on the basis of someone needing something to do, but there is a lot more to it than diversion or distraction.

There’s an element of life review. Sometimes it’s putting that on record. One man, for example, wants to talk about his lifelong passion for Millwall Football Club. So I sit with him and we record him recalling it all, the magic of the Stadium of Light. We’re just two blokes talking about football, but it’s so much more than that, he is recalling and recounting his love for his wife, his friendships, his memories.

In some cases they are also facing down demons or struggling to reach a point of acceptance as their life comes to a close. Stories and metaphors have power here. Mick is reminded of the image of King Canute, how one patient became absorbed in the story, the image of holding back the tide, part of the journey to recognise that he himself must face the inevitable.

The ‘products’ of work like this can be valuable things to leave behind for loved ones. A chance to tie up some loose ends, to have some reconciliation. They can be expressing something that they can’t otherwise talk about. Working through creativity, there is the possibility of finding a language to speak about the unspeakable. Reaching some accommodation or acceptance, having the final conversation – Mick is at pains to point out – doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the metaphor just hangs, you can’t go further. That’s just how it is.

It’s salutary to be reminded that there is a context to the work – that it doesn’t take place outside of a social and economic context of austerity. This is, after all, the NHS.

There are more people in need of palliative than we can serve. There’s more focus now on brief interventions and there’s more targeting. We can’t work with people who are medically stable. The pressure is for us to have a goal for the work, a limited but focused intervention. The work, though, is relational, it depends on relationship to enable the broaching of certain subjects. The argument is for us to be providing a model of care which is much more open ended, even if it doesn’t fit with the resource argument.

The work seems a world away from the excitement and acclaim of his former life in the theatre and Mick has thought hard about the difference, probing the question of audience and attention. One story tells it all.

One Friday afternoon I get a call from a doctor on the ward asking for a musician to come and play the blues for a patient who is dying. I take my guitar upstairs and introduce myself. I’m not a blues guitar player but I play 'Summertime' for him. I play it with my whole self. It’s an experience I have before where you play for someone who really drops down into themselves and profoundly listens. It was a receiving- a profound connection. I have played in front of 25,000 people and of course this was not the same, but it was as big as.

When I ask if his job is unbearably sad the answer is of course yes. Mick tells me about the bad days, the ones when he goes home ready to cry into his dinner, but for each of those there are the days when the work brings patients to anger, inspiration, and life.

Soon he will retire from this particular chapter in his professional life to become a psychotherapist and I ask him what he will miss or not once he moves on. He’ll miss his team, working with patients.

Julie Bull is a writer who lives in South London and Sussex, which sounds much posher than it is. In another life she was a civil servant but now writes full time. Her short stories have appeared in MIRonline and the Retreat West Anthology, The Word for Freedom. She is currently working on a story collection. She is nothing if not nosey, so she finds interviewing people to be a great non-fiction writing opportunity. You can find her @juliebu72